You can tell it's awards season when a glamorous actress appears onscreen without make-up for a role. Bullock will be hoping to catch the attention of awards voters with her role in gritty drama The Unforgivable.
Bullock has shed the glam to play an ex-con released from prison after serving 20 years for an "unforgivable" violent crime. The star's character, Ruth Slater, killed a police officer in circumstances yet to be revealed. Now released she begins to receive threats, with an anonymous phone caller warning her "You're gonna pay for what you did."
Undaunted by the threats, Ruth sets about trying to reconnect with her little sister Katie, played by rising Irish actress Aisling Franciosi. With the aid of a lawyer (Vincent D'Onofrio), Ruth tracks down her sister's foster parents, who are unwilling to allow her access to Katie.
If the plot of The Unforgivable sounds familiar, you've probably seen Unforgiven, the 2009 British mini-series it's based on. That series starred Coronation Street's Suranne Jones as a woman similarly released from prison after killing two police officers when she was a teenager. As with the remake, Unforgiven's protagonist embarked on a search for her estranged younger sister. The series was acclaimed on its release and played a major role in establishing Jones' career beyond Coronation Street.
Soon after Unforgiven's broadcast, the rights were bought by Hollywood. Writer/director Christopher McQuarrie had originally been slated to remake it as a feature film, but he dropped it to take over the Mission Impossible series.
Netflix will be hoping for a repeat of the success of their previous collaboration with Bullock, the 2018 post-apocalyptic thriller Bird Box. Viewed by over 89 million households in its first four weeks of release, Bird Box was Netflix's most watched original film at the time.
Along with starring in The Unforgivable, Bullock is also producing the film, which began filming in February 2020 before the pandemic forced production to shut down temporarily.
"My character is someone who has been incarcerated for 20 years for a pretty heinous crime [and] gets out," Bullock said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. "There are several people whose lives she affected by this crime she committed. And there's a lot of hatred and anger and bitterness and sorrow associated with her release. She wants to find this one person, the only family she had when she went in, and you keep asking yourself, 'Why can't you let it go? This family member was traumatised by your actions — let it go! Stop harming these people all over again.'"
Bullock describes the film as "a murder mystery within a very complex character drama."
"Finding out the background to the story of why she did what she did is sort of the whodunnit of this," she teased.
The cast also features Viola Davis, Jon Bernthal, Richard Thomas, Linda Emond and Rob Morgan.
Bullock said it was "ridiculous and selfishly beneficial" to work with such a talented cast.
"I don't care where you think you are on the level of talent on your acting scale, if you place yourself opposite those who are far better than you, they will only elevate you," the actress said. "I was so scared. I was basically making a silent film for my character, and I was like, 'If I fail with my emotional inner life, we've lost the storytelling.' But I would get opposite these tremendous human beings and you just go 'thank you' to be opposite talent like that. Everybody dreams about it. And then here we had it."
The film is directed by German filmmaker Nora Fingscheidt, who garnered rave reviews last year for her directorial debut System Crasher.
The Unforgivable is on Netflix from December 10th.
"Your life starts here now, not 20 years ago." pic.twitter.com/TzbJjGoV4m
— NetflixFilm (@NetflixFilm) October 26, 2021
